German Network Agency says 56 KBit/s is a functional internet connection.

[ARikozuM]

13 hours ago, Nicnac said:

Wait i thought we were talking about german government in the 80s?

The right-wing, on a global scale, has been on the rise since [at least the 90's]. The only countries that aren't having any of it are the "nordic" countries and some of the other not-American American nations. 

[vanished]

Give that another 3 orders of magnitude and you'll have my agreement.  These days, between streaming video, using cloud file services, downloading games, etc. anything under about 50 Mbit is simply not going to cut it imo.

[jagdtigger]

6 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

using cloud file services

Im not a fan of them but if you want to use it as an example the asymmetric pair of 50 down is 5 up which is pretty slow for that IMO. My current speed is 150 down and 15 up. The down is fine but the upload could be more....

[vanished]

10 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Im not a fan of them but if you want to use it as an example the asymmetric pair of 50 down is 5 up which is pretty slow for that IMO. My current speed is 150 down and 15 up. The down is fine but the upload could be more....

True, even on a "fast" connection like 150 or more, if upload is 1/10th of that it won't exactly feel fast, but I think that's at least usable.

Edited November 22, 2019 by Ryan_Vickers
typo

[cafe]

i dont consider anything under 1MB/s functional

[Mark Kaine]

On 11/17/2019 at 11:52 AM, FloRolf said:

As a German, I approve this. Our government is just too damn stupid to build a proper broadband internet. Not even in bigger cities I'm afraid. 

 

 

Edit: just to give you some perspective, just a couple years ago (like 2-4 years I don't remember) the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said "The internet is virigin territory for all of us"... 

This is a great post and I agree,  however for the German government it *is* virgin territory so she didn't even lie! 

 

On 11/17/2019 at 12:21 PM, Eigenvektor said:

I agree that 56 Kbps is nowhere near usable in today's Internet. But I'm not quite sure I get the point of the article. They're talking about switching off ISDN. If someone is still using ISDN, they're already limited to 64 Kbps (or 128 Kbps with bundling). So providing some form of universal access at 56 Kbps isn't that much slower than what those people already had to content with.

Actually,  while it's pretty shitty, it is usable,  you just can't watch videos (maybe in 120p?) nor play online games,  everything else should... work? 

 

Also i know it's possible that it's not available for *everyone* even though unlikely the case,  but you can get mobile Internet connection pretty much anywhere and it is pretty good - as long your mobile connection is not totally shit (yes, I know in some very rare cases it can be)  

I had a mobile connection (with router!)  for about a month 1MB up/down,  very much usable even for online play. 

[Eigenvektor]

5 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Actually,  while it's pretty shitty, it is usable,  you just can't watch videos (maybe in 120p?) nor play online games,  everything else should... work?

Sure, "usable". But not in any practical way. As OP mention in the very first post, even just the complaints form of the agency would take 9 minutes to download. Pretty sure this site right here would be all but unusable, too.

 

Imagine downloading RDR2, which is about 100 GB in size. That would take nearly 6 months, assuming no breaks. Any semi-large download that has no pause and resume functionality is right out.

 

Of course games aren't something you need and you can always buy a console and a physical disk. But what about work? As a developer I need to keep my git repositories in sync. A git pull can be anywhere from a few KB to a few MB in size. I would waste half of my day simply pulling the latest changes before I could even think about starting working.

[Nicnac]

9 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

The right-wing, on a global scale, has been on the rise since [at least the 90's]. The only countries that aren't having any of it are the "nordic" countries and some of the other not-American American nations. 

Well in the last years the German government has clearly taken an increasingly left stance 

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, Eigenvektor said:

Sure, "usable". But not in any practical way. As OP mention in the very first post, even just the complaints form of the agency would take 9 minutes to download. Pretty sure this site right here would be all but unusable, too.

 

Imagine downloading RDR2, which is about 100 GB in size. That would take nearly 6 months, assuming no breaks. Any semi-large download that has no pause and resume functionality is right out.

 

Of course games aren't something you need and you can always buy a console and a physical disk. But what about work? As a developer I need to keep my git repositories in sync. A git pull can be anywhere from a few KB to a few MB in size. I would waste half of my day simply pulling the latest changes before I could even think about starting working.

Yeah I was just thinking of ways they *could*  say it's usable... But you're right outside of videogames,   watching videos etc,  professional work would also be massively restricted   you could write emails or download small files but not video conferences,  download important programs or updates,  etc.. 

 

It just goes to show how apparently clueless the german government is

[Eigenvektor]

2 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Yeah I was just thinking of ways they *could*  say it's usable... But you're right outside of videogames,   watching videos etc,  professional work would also be massively restricted   you could write emails or download small files but not video conferences,  download important programs or updates,  etc.. 

 

It just goes to show how apparently clueless the german government is

Right, I didn't even think about video conferences. I'm not disagreeing with you, btw. It was clear to me what you were getting at They could certainly go "Well, you are online, aren't you?", knowing full well that for all practical purposes you might just as well be offline, for how usable it is for any reasonable definition of usable.

[jagdtigger]

10 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

True, even on a "fast" connection like 150 or more, if download is 1/10th of that it won't exactly feel fast, but I think that's at least usable.

I think you meant to write "if upload is 1/10th" there... And it isnt usable if you want to access stuff remotely like pictures and stuff .

[vanished]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

I think you meant to write "if upload is 1/10th" there... And it isnt usable if you want to access stuff remotely like pictures and stuff .

Ah, yes true I meant upload

[0p3nS4uc3-l1nux]

On 11/17/2019 at 7:49 AM, Nicnac said:

This is just hilarious: The German federal network agency calls an internet connection with 56 KBit/s "functional".

The background here is that ISDN connections will be switched off in the process of migrating the IP system (towards VDSL). As a result many people will have no proper internet connection because the infrastructure just isn't there. This primarily affects people in the rural areas of Germany.

They now issued a statement that 56 KBit/s are a functional internet connection. But it gets even better: Telekom doesn't have to provide service at all. There is no legal framework that forces them to replace people's internet connection or offer an alternative. So I guess you're lucky if you get 56 KBit/s. For comparison: just loading the complains form of the federal network agency would take about 9 minutes on a connection like that.

 

Source (German)

 

I think this is hilarious and just another example of how unplanned, clumsy and inept the expansion of broadband internet within Germany is taking place.

 

What´s more hilarious is that pegasus can h4ck you and the German federovskiet under 2mins on a 26k dial-up, just by listening to the sound below, try it out if you miss the gold old fashion 35.5k and 56k modems

p3g4my4sus.mp3

[amdorintel]

On 11/21/2019 at 11:51 PM, Nicnac said:

Well in the last years the German government has clearly taken an increasingly left stance 

is that because of the hoardes of newcomers into Germany?

[mr moose]

On 11/22/2019 at 8:54 AM, Ryan_Vickers said:

Give that another 3 orders of magnitude and you'll have my agreement.  These days, between streaming video, using cloud file services, downloading games, etc. anything under about 50 Mbit is simply not going to cut it imo.

I have a house of 5 adults, all heavy internet users and we survive without usability issues on 20Mb/s.

 

On 11/22/2019 at 9:45 AM, RelativeMono said:

i dont consider anything under 1MB/s functional

 

To be honest once you get a few people in the house anything under 10 starts to give you grief, I wouldn't even call 3Mb/s functional then.  I would say you need at least 4-5Mb/s per person for everyday usage and another 10Mb/s across the network for downloads (not everybody updates and downloads at the same time. 

[vanished]

10 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I have a house of 5 adults, all heavy internet users and we survive without usability issues on 20Mb/s.

I guess it depends what you're doing.  With fewer people, we found 10 Mbit to routinely be a considerable bottleneck, one that the leap to 30 significantly reduced but did not completely eliminate.  There has been nary an issue now with over 100 for the last few years.

[mr moose]

5 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I guess it depends what you're doing.  With fewer people, we found 10 Mbit to routinely be a considerable bottleneck, one that the leap to 30 significantly reduced but did not completely eliminate.  There has been nary an issue now with over 100 for the last few years.

Just your usual generic internet stuff, youtube, netflix, gaming, downloading games, updates, the odd program x 5.

 

Even when 4 of us are video streaming at the same time there are no observable delays or degradation in quality.

[vanished]

4 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Just your usual generic internet stuff, youtube, netflix, gaming, downloading games, updates, the odd program x 5.

 

Even when 4 of us are video streaming at the same time there are no observable delays or degradation in quality.

I know Amazon Prime video targeted roughly 6.5 GB per hour at 1080p, which works out to 15 Mbit/s.  A quick search tells me Netflix is apparently around 1/3 of that, and a quick calculation on a random 1080p60 Youtube video I opened (filesize over length) tells me they're at about 1/5.  Given this I suppose what you described would fit into 20 Mbit/s but only just and leave no room for anything else.  If someone started a update or game install, something would have to give.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I know Amazon Prime video targeted roughly 6.5 GB per hour at 1080p, which works out to 15 Mbit/s.  A quick search tells me Netflix is apparently around 1/3 of that, and a quick calculation on a random 1080p60 Youtube video I opened (filesize over length) tells me they're at about 1/5.  Given this I suppose what you described would fit into 20 Mbit/s but only just and leave no room for anything else.  If someone started a update or game install, something would have to give.

I don't know what to tell you,  we use about 900GB-1TB a month and the only time I have issues with lag or servers no responding or video  buffering is when the Internet drops out completely (non usage related problems).

[vanished]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

I don't know what to tell you,  we use about 900GB-1TB a month and the only time I have issues with lag or servers no responding or video  buffering is when the Internet drops out completely (non usage related problems).

Nothing to explain, if it works, it works, and besides, based on my numbers it makes sense that it would   I'm just trying to get a sense of the situation and imagine the limits.

[mr moose]

Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

Nothing to explain, if it works, it works, and besides, based on my numbers it makes sense that it would   I'm just trying to get a sense of the situation and imagine the limits.

My brain is fried right now so I am not going to try and work out how many Mb/s you need to download  1TB in a month.  I imagine it's not very high though.

[vanished]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

My brain is fried right now so I am not going to try and work out how many Mb/s you need to download  1TB in a month.  I imagine it's not very high though.

A 24/7 stream of ~3.2 Mbit/s should do it

[mr moose]

 

33 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

A 24/7 stream of ~3.2 Mbit/s should do it

Well that fits in with this then.

 

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

 

 I would say you need at least 4-5Mb/s per person for everyday usage and another 10Mb/s across the network for downloads (not everybody updates and downloads at the same time. 

 

 

 

 

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

something would have to give.

This where traffic shaping can come in handy...

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

This where traffic shaping can come in handy...

Shaping is more of a local network thing, the CPU demand and having to manage different sets of priority queues doesn't scale well. That's why on a fibre plan the speed is negotiated line rate so each end understands what the available bandwidth is, shaping is transparent and relies on TCP window scaling but UDP on the other hand has no equivalent which is very bad as shaping is just dropping packets and hoping the transmitting end figures out and slows down, which UDP itself will never do.

 

The problem only gets worse as the differential between line rate and shaped bandwidth increases, more packets being dropped. The physical transport medium needs to support different line rates but even then will not adjust that without cutting the connection and reestablishing it which is really bad user experience, plus your IP could change.

 

Traffic shaping is done by ISPs but it's using very basic global rule sets like all of [Streaming Service] or a specific protocol [PPTP, IKEv2, IPsec, GRE, L2TP, SSTP], not on a per user basis.